Pete Wells

3 weeks ago | sonomanews.com | Pete Wells

Americans already thought they were in love with Italian food in 1973 when Hazan’s first book, “The Classic Italian Cookbook,” came out. What they were in love with was, in fact, the product of a mass migration of Italians who, more often than not, came from Campania, Sicily and other Southern regions. Many were fleeing the desperate rural poverty of tenant farms run under almost feudal conditions. Others were tradespeople with no formal education.

4 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Pete Wells

Pete Wells explores how the revered cookbook author changed the way Americans think about the cuisine. Twelve years after her death, nobody has overtaken Marcella Hazan as the source Americans consult to understand the food of Italy. Credit... Courtesy of Obscured Pictures In the 1980s, an assistant at Glamour took her romantic life to the next level with the aid of two lemons and a chicken.

1 month ago | nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com | Julia Moskin |William Grimes |Pete Wells |Frank Bruni

Via Carota, the effortlessly chic and popular Italian restaurant on Grove Street, is Greenwich Village today in a ramekin of Castelvetrano olives. Loving it is almost a religion in elite food circles. Decades ago, through the windows of my boyhood apartment in the Village I watched when a predecessor, Da Silvano, the now-shuttered Northern Italian trattoria, opened across the street.

1 month ago | nzherald.co.nz | Pete Wells |Robert Simonson

The ice-cold Cuban cocktail is revered by bartenders. So why don’t they sell more of them? Bar Kabawa, the East Village cocktail den connected to chef Paul Carmichael’s new Caribbean restaurant, Kabawa, will provoke a range of reactions, like any new establishment. But for people who like classic daiquiris, the main one will be: where have you been all our lives? Outside Cuba, where it originated, the daiquiri has rarely been treated to such elaborate shows of devotion.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Pete Wells

Every waiter knows the type: the volatile diner who barges in with a list of demands, orders an off-the-menu item that sends the kitchen into a panic and then at the last minute changes his mind and decides he'll just have the steak. So if anybody knows how to handle President Trump's stunning reversal on tariffs, it's people in the restaurant business. Still, it's safe to say that they've had a rough week.